Usurper
by Librarian00X
Summary: For every crown, an outstretched hand - and two more too weak to offer it willingly.
1. A Pretender Rises

It'd been a long time since she'd lost track of how long she'd been alive, Wendy realized.

The charcoal tallies on the sign in the corner of her camp, combined with the cuts on her arm for when she couldn't come back to record them, totalled up to somewhere around 67, but that couldn't be right. This was her third winter. That'd put her closer to somewhere around day 90 or so. How many days did a full cycle of seasons even comprise of? She wanted to say 40, but she'd noted previously that winters lasted slightly shorter than summers. Or was that just the first one? Did it vary?

Wendy didn't like losing her bearings. It made her feel very…disorganized. Helpless, even.

A grumble about time was drowned out by the crackling of embers as another log was kicked onto the fire, tossing a handful of sparks up into the infinite blackness in place of a sky. The heat and light staved off both the cold and the darkness at the same time - an effective combo indeed. Fire was good for holding off all kinds of death.

For some, though, it just wasn't good enough.

…_.hhhhhh…_

Blank white eyes widened against her will as the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She knew that sound. It'd been a long time since she'd heard it, but not nearly long enough.

After untold years repeating the cycle of life and death, mastering the hardships of the artificial nature she'd been thrown into against all odds, perhaps only one thing outside the ungraspable horror of madness still evoked this kind of reaction out of her. It was an alien sensation, one she didn't know how to cope with, even with all her senses still with her, and for a moment it left Wendy completely paralyzed. Bar insanity, which was by nature beyond one's ability to handle, that sound - and the creature that created it - brought up a feeling that nothing else in this Hell world could ever make her experience.

Fear.

It took a second breathy growl on the wind for the panic to kick in, and Wendy found herself on her feet without knowing how she got there. For a second she wasn't sure what the best course of action would be; Abigail's flower hadn't opened since the latest spider massacre, and fighting was out of the question. It wasn't even coming for her anyway; all it seemed to want to do was destroy every structure she'd ever created - which, at this point, was quite a bit. She couldn't afford to rebuild everything.

The camp. Run to save the camp. If it tracked her before it appeared, maybe it'd spawn somewhere else and she could lead it far away.

She grabbed Abigail's flower without bothering to make a torch and sprinted head-long into the fatal darkness. She'd settled in a pine forest, and to the south was the tip of the peninsula. North was the only valid destination. The glow of her heatstone struggled to keep the blackness at bay, and it only illuminated perhaps half a foot in front of her, giving her perhaps a millisecond to dodge the trees as she ran them by.

She didn't slow down, didn't pause to make a torch, just kept running. Whether the vibrations going through her body were more from her half-numb legs pounding the earth or the walls of her heart slamming against the inside of her rib cage wasn't clear.

It was only a matter of time before Wendy crashed head-long into a tree, as she knew she would. She was on her feet in less than a second, quickly latching onto her heat stone, its puny light keeping her alive against the offensive blackness. The mouth of night she'd felt opening around her faded, and a quiet sigh of relief passed through her pale lips.

Then the sky fell and crushed Wendy flat.

* * *

Existence came as it always did: with a splitting headache.

"Say, pal, you don't look so good."

"Enough!"

A pale arm lashed out at fuzzy nothing, evoking a harsh laugh that ended with an explosion of smoke. Wendy lost her balance immediately and collapsed back onto the ground, rolling into the fetal position with her forehead against the earth, gripping her throbbing head and squinting as hard as she could to hold back tears.

She couldn't remember since it had ended up like this, when death left her disoriented and she didn't understand what had happened. It came from above, that much she knew. Soon she would deduce that somehow she had ended up running straight into the Deerclops, which had ended her life accordingly. It was a fluke and easily preventable. Had she donned her mining helmet, she would have seen it coming and perhaps even led it away as she'd planned. A stupid mistake cost her everything.

Sensory overload faded, leaving behind the burn of humiliation and anger. Weakness, even after all this time…every torture method suffered through, every monster slain at least once, every oppressive entity defied, except for one.

After so long, Wendy still hadn't been able to bring herself to fight the Deerclops. It scared her. She was afraid.

Clenched fists tore up something out of the ground - as it so happened, it was a carrot. Wendy jammed the tuber into her mouth and bit it in half, grinding her teeth as she gradually forced herself to her feet, stomping off into the wilderness that had held her captive for so long. A better portion of the plant life in the meadow she'd spawned in would consequently be mutilated well beyond what was necessary as she delivered her wrath to anything she could lay her hands on. The ghost of a grieving child spat black vengeance in every direction as her puny, meaningless life carried itself inevitably forward, as it always seemed to.

It was thus that the plot to usurp the king of winter began to form.


	2. To Kill A King

Ironically, despite the gargantuan task set before her, there was little Wendy could do but bide her time.

Some options included going through the Doorway, then committing suicide immediately until she came across the level made of eternal winter, but that world posed its own special set of challenges that would make an already difficult task even harder. Beginning in winter was always hard, especially early on, and long term was almost impossible. Grass wouldn't grow back, farms were out of the question…every resources was finite everywhere she went, and the fact that the island was cut up by rows of impenetrable pillars that kept careful track of your sanity further compounded the immediate threat of resource deprivation, not to mention the omnipresent hazards of weathering extreme cold that would never go away.

And on top of all that, attacking the King of Winter in his own territory was just asking for trouble. If she wanted to succeed, it had to be on her terms, in her territory, when she had everything that she needed. She had to wait for the Deerclops to come to her.

Doing so was perhaps one of the most painful tasks Wendy had ever set her mind to.

Her latest life went the usual way: spent several days running around, never stopping until the customary amounts of supplies were plentiful enough that she could consider settling down somewhere. She supposed she ought to be more considerate when thinking of a permanent base location, but most of the time she ended up slapping a fire pit in place and a science machine a short distance away, generally close to a line of trees for easy access of wood. Nothing else mattered; Wendy had developed to the point that survival was all but guaranteed for an extensive amount of time regardless of the location.

Life blurred as the monotony set in. Wendy traveled around the island for days at a time when food was plentiful enough, looking for anything of interest and extra resources. Many trees died to be used in a pair of chests and eventually a crockpot, several meat drying racks, and an even more intricate science machine.

The rules had slightly changed since her last life, as they sometimes did, but Wendy was quick to adapt and had a new contraption ready, which granted access to constructs and contraptions of a more arcane nature. Its reference to pulling a rabbit out of a hat was not lost upon her. It was probably a joke of some kind. It wasn't funny.

Come winter, Wendy had gathered enough materials and had explored a considerable enough expanse of land to justify the settling down in response to the rapid drop in temperature. Abigail had donated her lethal presence to the slaying of some Beefalo, which would provide more than enough insulation for winter apparel and a rugged wool blanket to stave off the cold.

For several long, dark weeks, Wendy hugged a glowing heat stone through the itching fabric, scooted closer to the fireplace, belly full of stockpiled meats and slightly stale vegetables, and waited for something to happen.

Winter thawed overnight, and the seasons reset in a matter of days. Summer came again.

Wendy shed her warm clothing and started the process over.

This was Wendy's life: roaming, exploring, foraging, collecting, stockpiling. Endless preparation for a goal that would never be reached, maintaining a life that she had no choice but to continue prolonging, simply because there was no alternative. Maintaining her life, maintaining tasks to make maintaining her life easier, maintaining maintenance to tasks to make maintenance in general easier….maintaining to maintain to maintain. Endless hardships, endless pain, endless discomfort speckled with brief moments of respite before she had to harden up again to prepare for the next wave of Hounds, or to build up reserves for the upcoming winter, or to lay low for a while until Abigail was ready to be summoned to help compensate for her deplorable strength. Preparation until the day she died and had no means to return - and then it'd start all over again. This was her life. Eternal preparation.

Day 100 came and went. Even with the tallies, Wendy barely noticed. One hundred, one thousand, one million...were any of those numbers really any different? What is a number? What is a day? What is time? What was she measuring? Who was she? Was she really alive?

This was why Wendy stopped thinking after a while: the questions got harder to answer and hurt after some time. Questions are dangerous. Life is better without them.

The island, more or less, had been completely conquered. There were many spider nests growing larger and multiplying slowly out of control in the woods, but one lightning strike or tossed torch could end that problem in seconds. The intelligence of the Hounds continued to shift with every couple of waves, making their behavior increasingly unpredictable as time went on, but for the most part it was a simple matter of summoning Abigail and cutting them down as she sucked the life from them.

Farms were successful unconditionally, food reserves were always at a comfortable level and sometimes producing excess that needed to be disposed of, and every portal piece had been compiled and were currently sitting obediently on their pedestal somewhere, waiting to be activated for that one way trip deeper into ouroboros, where the cycle of preparation could start anew once more. Wendy had gone mad more than once and had even created a small gem construct to emulate madness, which would make hunting down all those nasty ingredients for more horrible creations that much more convenient. She had everything she needed for now and ways to get what she needed if she ever needed it again. The map was complete and all major roadblocks had been cleared.

It was around this time, normally, that Wendy would contemplate either abandoning this world for another, or suicide, just so she could start over and have something to do. Boredom was a lethal thing, she'd learned - something even more lethal than the Hounds of Hell that came for her in increasingly large numbers every few days. Sometimes they just died; sometimes they caused massive damage that took days to fix. Sometimes they caught her off guard and came when Abigail wasn't ready, or if she didn't have a sacrifice and had to scramble to toss down the flower and crush a butterfly so she would have that extra fighting power. She had no interest in the underground and spent most of her days wandering.

Yes, it would be best if she went away, whether through the portal or by taking Death's cold, accepting hand. This place had nothing left to offer. Loitering would only wear at what precious mental stability she could not track, but knew was slowly, steadily draining with every second she existed in this cycle of purgatory.

She wanted to die. Very much so, in fact. Some nights Wendy found herself touching her throat, imagining the sweet darkness that would close in after but a few moments of choking, leading up to a climax of peace that grew exponentially, right up until this instant of perfection swallowed everything about her...the choking was brief and so worth it. It was so, so worth it. The memories left her feeling light and dreamy for a while.

And yet she remained. Death could always come later, tempting though it was. For now she resisted her impulses and simply...lived. Waiting. Preparing. Reviewing her plans over and over, just to be doubly, triply sure it was all in place. She longed for the moment where it would all come together, or fail catastrophically so that she could get to setting it all up again. She didn't care what happened, really, but something needed to happen. Anything, even if it was bad.

One winter evening, Wendy got her wish.

The area had been baited heavily. Rocky wasteland became strangely more organized in its rocky outcroppings, namely in how every rock had been shattered and cut and then stacked back up again, forming thick stone squares all across the area, more resembling haphazard markers for an especially strange graveyard or minefield than segments of wall.

The Deerclops was a furious thing, always looking to destroy anything that had ever been shaped, because it knew that its prey morphed the land around it. Thus, lacking any real sense of smell or hearing, it sought out unnatural formations - and in this case, the obstacle course of wall pieces was an irresistible temptation. It just had to go in and smash them. Maybe bring out its prey in the process. Anything to vent its fury from the omnipresent feeling of starvation that ravaged its body, and the bottomless appetite that forever plagued it.

Wendy stood a long distance away, to the point that even the vibrations through the ground were negligible. She stood atop a lone boulder in a cacophony of biome fragments, pebbles and flint scattered all around between the occasional tree or pillar of basalt. The end of a walking tip slowly and rhythmically tapped against the rock under her feet, forming a beat that the giant some two hundred meters away smashed apart the structures she'd formed. Logsuit, helmet…a classic outfit choice. A heatstone glowed from within a spot where its warmth could spread under the armor, barely visible, and a tentacle spike dangled from slack fingers, balancing perilously on the pads of her fingers. A strangely normal set of apparel for such an occasion.

Not that this was all she'd done. Oh no, not at all. In a little cavern under that basalt pillar to her left was three extra sets of armor, dried meats, spears, tentacles spikes, honey poultice, disinfectant goo…anything and everything necessary for extended combat. She even would have brought a crossbow with fire bolts, if the design actually worked. The bow did; turns out that the gems lost any inherent fire properties when you damaged them or ground them to a point. To compensate, the blade of shadows in its sheath on her hip would provide that extra kick. Abigail would probably help, too. It was evening, after all.

"King of Winter!"

Against the snow falling down and the thunderous crashing of stone and claws in the distance, the Deerclops didn't respond. This was expected.

"King of Winter!" She yelled out again regardless. The spiked end of her cudgel pointed in its general direction, like it bore some kind of authority. "I label you: pretender! I challenge you now for your claim, for your title over this frozen season and the symbols beneath it! I demand from you now: resign from your seat, or be dethroned by force! This is your only warning!"

By this time, the Deerclops had finished destroying the small field of stone posts and had started to stomp about aimlessly. It didn't seem quite sure of what to do.

Wendy didn't expect acknowledgement; it was never a necessary part of her plan. It seemed appropriate, though. The role of usurper should be filled thoroughly. And so, since there was no compliance, hostilities were warranted.

Wendy tossed the walking stick aside and tightened her grip on the clammy tentacle spike. The heat of the heat stone and the fire to her back didn't seem to do much against the chill resonating from somewhere within her, nor did it affect the delicate trembling in her hands and legs.

She was afraid. She was very, very afraid.

It was the most alive she'd ever felt.

"So be it."

And then Wendy charged.


End file.
